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Often a cold shudder has run through me, and I have asked myself whether I may have not devoted myself to a fantasy.

Charles Darwin

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Charles Darwin
Age: 73 †
Born: 1809
Born: February 12
Died: 1882
Died: April 19
Beekeeper
Botanist
Carcinologist
Entomologist
Ethologist
Explorer
Geologist
Naturalist
Philosopher
Travel Writer
The Mount
Shrewsbury
Charles Robert Darwin
Charles R. Darwin
Darwin
Running
Shudder
May
Devoted
Fantasy
Evolution
Asked
Cold
Whether
Often

More quotes by Charles Darwin

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The survival or preservation of certain favoured words in the struggle for existence is natural selection.
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The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely that man is descended from some lowly-organised form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many persons. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians.
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Great is the power of steady misrepresentation but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.
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Some few, and I am one of them, even wish to God, though at the loss of millions of lives, that the North would proclaim a crusade against slavery. In the long-run, a million horrid deaths would be amply repaid in the cause of humanity. Great God! how I should like to see the greatest curse on earth - slavery - abolished!
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Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.
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In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God ... I think that generally (& more and more so as I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct description of my state of mind.
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You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly.
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As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.
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Thus we have given to man a pedigree of prodigious length, but not, it may be said, of noble quality.
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This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.
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We fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.
Charles Darwin
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It is absurd to talk of one animal being higher than another...we consider those, where the intellectual faculties most developed as the highest. - A bee doubtless would [use] ... instincts as a criteria.
Charles Darwin
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Even when we are quite alone, how often do we think with pleasure or pain of what others think of us - of their imagined approbation or disapprobation.
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In my simplicity, I remember wondering why every gentleman did not become an ornithologist.
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A moral being is one who is capable of reflecting on his past actions and their motives - of approving of some and disapproving of others.
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With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.
Charles Darwin
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He who is not content to look, like a savage, at the phenomena of nature as disconnected, cannot any longer believe that man is the work of a separate act of creation ... Man is the co-descendant with other mammals of a common progenitor.
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One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.
Charles Darwin
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Wherever the European has trod, death seems to pursue the aboriginal.
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Formerly Milton's Paradise Lost had been my chief favourite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the Beagle, when I could take only a single small volume, I always chose Milton.
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